In 1942 a Dutch warship escaped the Japanese Navy by pretending to be an island. It worked. By early March 1942, the Dutch East Indies were falling. The Japanese had crushed the Allied fleet at the Battle of the Java Sea. Java was about to be overrun. The last Dutch ships still afloat were ordered to run for Australia. One of them was HNLMS Abraham Crijnssen, a small, slow minesweeper about 180 feet long. She had almost no guns that could stop an airplane, and she couldn't outrun a Japanese destroyer if her life depended on it. Which it did. She was supposed to make the escape with three other Dutch warships. Those ships were caught and sunk. Abraham Crijnssen was on her own. Her captain, Lieutenant Commander Anton van Miert, came up with a plan that sounds insane. The waters between Java and Australia are scattered with thousands of islands. Many of them are just tiny specks of land with a few trees on top. So the crew went ashore and cut down trees and jungle plants. They covered the entire ship in them, from bow to stern, until she looked like a small jungle-covered island. They painted the exposed parts of the hull gray and brown to look like rock and cliffs. There was one catch. Islands don't move. So during the day, the ship anchored right up against real islands and sat completely still. The crew refreshed the wilting leaves and stayed out of sight. Japanese planes flew overhead. They saw nothing but one more island. At night, the "island" pulled up anchor and crept south toward Australia. Night after night, day after day, she slipped through waters crawling with Japanese ships and aircraft. After about eight days, the coast of Australia came into view. On March 20, 1942, Abraham Crijnssen sailed into Fremantle. She was the last Allied ship to escape Java, and the only one of her class in the region to survive. She went on to serve the rest of the war with the Royal Australian Navy hunting submarines. And she's still around today. Abraham Crijnssen is preserved as a museum ship at the Dutch Navy Museum in Den Helder, in the Netherlands.

The best Japanese admiral of WW2 wasn't Yamamoto. It was a destroyer commander the Americans nicknamed "Tenacious Tanaka." Rear Admiral Raizo Tanaka. No carriers. No battleships. Just a squadron of destroyers, a stack of the best torpedoes in the world, and a nearly impossible job. August 1942. US Marines have landed on Guadalcanal and grabbed the airfield. Japan needs to land troops and supplies on the island to take it back. But American planes from that airfield own the skies during the day. Any Japanese transport caught in daylight gets sunk. So Tanaka moves at night. His destroyers race down "the Slot," the channel through the Solomon Islands, arrive off Guadalcanal after dark, unload, and are gone before dawn. Over and over. Night after night. The Marines started calling it the "Tokyo Express." It ran so regularly you could almost set a watch by it. Destroyers aren't cargo ships, though. So Tanaka's men got creative. They packed supplies into steel drums, roped the drums together, and pushed them overboard near shore so troops could swim out and haul them in. Destroyers built to fight were now delivering groceries under fire. Then came the night of November 30, 1942. Tanaka is heading for Guadalcanal with eight destroyers. Six of them are loaded down with supply drums, decks cluttered, not ready for a fight. He's told to expect trouble. Trouble is waiting. An American task force of five cruisers and six destroyers under Rear Admiral Carleton Wright. The Americans have radar. The Japanese don't. Wright detects Tanaka first. On paper, this should be a massacre. But the Americans hesitate before firing torpedoes. When they do open fire, they pour almost everything into one Japanese destroyer, Takanami, and quickly sink it. The muzzle flashes give the American cruisers away. Tanaka doesn't panic. His crews have trained for exactly this. Within minutes, his destroyers fire spreads of Type 93 torpedoes, the weapon the Americans would later call the "Long Lance." Huge, fast, running on pure oxygen so they left almost no wake, and with a range far beyond anything the US Navy thought was possible. The torpedoes come out of the dark. USS Minneapolis is hit and loses her bow. USS New Orleans takes a hit that sets off a magazine and blows off her entire bow, nearly 150 feet of ship. USS Pensacola is hit and burns. USS Northampton takes two torpedoes and sinks. In about half an hour, a force of half-loaded destroyers had crippled or sunk four heavy cruisers. Around 400 Americans were killed. Japan lost one destroyer. The Battle of Tassafaronga is still considered one of the worst US Navy defeats of the war. Even the official American naval historian later praised Tanaka for it. And here's the twist. Tanaka understood something his bosses refused to accept. Guadalcanal was lost. Feeding an island by throwing drums off destroyers wasn't a strategy. It was a slow bleed of ships and men Japan couldn't replace. He said so. In December 1942, after his flagship was sunk and he was wounded, he was removed from command. He never commanded at sea again. He spent the rest of the war in shore assignments, sidelined. Two months later, Japan evacuated Guadalcanal. Tanaka survived the war and lived until 1969. The man the Americans respected most was the one his own navy didn't want to listen to.